Looney Tunes: Carrot Crazy, also known as Bugs Bunny & Lola Bunny: Operation Carrot Patch in Europe is a 1998 action platformer developed by VD-dev. Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, Taz, Marvin the Martian, and Elmer Fudd have stolen all of Bugs and Lola's carrots and hid them in the nearby studio. Bugs and Lola must head through five different studio sets in order to get them all back!
36-Frame Improvement: The only improvement is in Taz's Zoo Scene 2 (specifically at 11:31 in the encode). A better-positioned fall towards the super carrot allowed me to collect it more towards the upper-left corner of its hitbox. This seemingly minor change allowed me to completely clear the building and fall directly onto the hippo after the powerup ends, instead of having to jump to it from the building.
Objectives
- Plays on hardest difficulty
- Genre: Action/Platformer
Difficulty
Playing on Hard increases the HP of most enemies to 2 and disables hints. Additionally you start with 4 HP instead of 5, and 3 lives instead of 4.
Fall Damage
Falling from a great height not only damages you; it INSTA-KILLS you. This height isn't even that large either: about 120 pixels, which is only about the size of the gameplay window! This is why seemingly unoptimal paths are taken on some descents: Bugs will have to collect a super carrot or touch multiple platforms on the way down, or Lola will have to use her umbrella to survive large falls.
Bugs vs Lola
Bugs has the ability to push heavy objects as well as burrow into the ground. While Lola can't do either of these, she does have an umbrella which allows you to survive falls from great heights when deployed.
The transition time between characters takes about 61 frames to complete, so we must always make sure the time saved by switching is greater than this number. Additionally, the character transition forces you to come to a complete stop; so if we transition at a place where we have to turn around or come to a complete stop anyway, the time we would've spent decelerating is now cancelled.
We can also switch characters right as we fall over a ledge, resulting in a funny glitch that transitions us while falling. This is only optimal in places where we must descend and progress in the opposite direction (as all of our X speed is lost when doing so) and when Lola won't have to use her umbrella anymore (as that momentarily slows X and Y speed).
Carrots
Each carrot collected wastes 8 frames during the countdown sequence at the end of the level. If it takes more than 8 frames to dodge a carrot, we opt to collect it instead.
However, carrots aren't only collected for points. If you jump and continue holding jump, Bugs/Lola will do a sort of shimmy that'll give their jump a bit of extra height/distance. The duration of the shimmy is determined by how many carrots you've collected. Many levels can't even be completed if you're below a certain number of carrots. Turns out a whole bunch of skips can only be done with certain carrot counts as well, which will be referenced in the level descriptions below.
Pushing boxes, the hippos in Taz's Zoo, and the lifts in Space Station all move so slowly that a little bit of time is saved doing a midair shimmy farther out from where a standard jump would normally clear the gap. However, less than 8 frames is saved per carrot for each, so it isn't optimal to collect as many carrots as possible for these situations. Instead, if we must have a certain carrot count for a jump later on, we aim to satisfy this count as early as we can to save time for the aforementioned situations.
RNG
The only RNG element in the TAS is the AI of a few enemies. None of the patterns I came across even inconvenienced the TAS so no RNG manipulation was used in the run.
Boss Levels
Each boss level starts with a HELLA long autoscroller. I try to make each as entertaining as possible by doing some silly movements but damn are they long. Any carrots collected in these stages are unavoidable. Each boss is defeated the same way - whacking them with a hammer every 35 frames until they're dead.
Treasure Island Scene 1
10 carrots are required to clear the wall at 1:13.
Treasure Island Scene 2
10 carrots are also required for a similar wall at 2:20.
Crazy Town Scene 1
Collecting the last clapboard before the third one ended up being a few frames faster simply because you get to prolong the usage of the habanero carrot powerup.
Crazy Town Scene 2
Ladders have some weird mechanics; you can jump up them, but you must move away from them a certain distance before grabbing again (hence the C-shaped jumps I have to make). Three ladders are the same height and only require two large jumps to get up. However, three short jumps are required for the second ladder since it's taller.
Skip: At 7:10, we collect the super carrot at the very top right of its hitbox so that we land at the top of the hydrant jet instead of waiting for it to come down.
Taz's Zoo Scene 1
Skip: At 10:37, Lola collects a super carrot and with the help of her umbrella, lands on top of one of the zoo buildings. The only other way past this building is to burrow under the building as Bugs which is very slow.
Skip: At 10:56, remember using hippos to cross gaps is extremely slow. Luckily, with the help of the habanero carrot plus 12 regular carrots, it's possible to simply jump and shimmy across this huge gap.
Skip: At 11:03, collecting this super carrot in a VERY precise manner, we're able to make it all the way up to the fourth clapboard without even collecting that one carrot at the bottom (the one we barely miss). I can't stress enough just how precise doing both of those things at once is.
Taz's Zoo Scene 2
The trick we do at 11:30 is just as stupid precise as the last one. If bugs were to fall to the ground from this height, it would be a death. Yet somehow we barely managed to collect the super carrot at the bottom to break our fall without even collecting the regular carrot above it.
Jumping from the balloons to the top of the wall at 11:52 requires 9 carrots to clear.
Skip: Another well-positioned super carrot collect at 12:06 allows us to collect the fourth clapboard in the sky early, similar to Scene 1.
Space Station Scene 1
Skip: Collecting the second clapboard is barely impossible with the super carrot... but, if we do a midair shimmy and collect the super carrot from top-right of its hitbox, we can just barely make it (15:06). 9 carrots are required to get the minimum height/distance we want here.
Space Station Scene 2
I determined it was 8 frames faster to get the third clapboard by simply jumping and shimmying across the large gap immediately before it (16:52). 17 carrots are required to clear this gap.
Elmer Fudd's Forest Scene 1
Skip: The fourth clapboard was collected early with the help of the super carrot once again (21:10).
Elmer Fudd's Forest Scene 2
10 carrots are required to collect the second clapboard, which is annoying because the 10th carrot is much farther into the level. Turns out, the fastest way to get there is to use the habanero carrot to ignore pushing the rock and simply jump across to the ledge (21:51). In order to get back after backtracking, however, we gotta push the rock to its proper place.
30 carrots are required to collect the last clapboard, which means only two in the entire level were ignored.
Suggested Screenshot: Frame 78539
Suggested Publication Notes
"Looney Tunes: Carrot Crazy, also known as Bugs Bunny & Lola Bunny: Operation Carrot Patch in Europe is a 1998 action platformer developed by VD-dev. Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, Taz, Marvin the Martian, and Elmer Fudd have stolen all of Bugs and Lola's carrots and hid them in the nearby studio. Bugs and Lola must head through five different studio sets in order to get them all back!"
"Winslinator improves upon the previous publication by 36 frames thanks to a new optimization in Taz's Zoo Scene 2."
Samsara: File replaced with a
23 minute slower file, rejected for suboptimality version with a fixed cycle count.
